How dare we not read the WASP etiquette guides so that someone can insult us by offering us congratulations and trying to shake our hands? HOW DARE WE?
If she didn’t already know, she would soon be told by the groom’s family. If she was lucky. Otherwise the round of social shunning afterward would make the point.
One can tell by the way they trashed the bride in more private settings and otherwise shunned her socially there after.
ZPG Zealot, *why *are handshakes and bridal congratulations the hill you want to die on?
I once saw a Gamma Mu Mu reorient someone’s shrimp fork, which of course meant that the shrimp forker was calling the shrimp forkee an itinerant cobbler whose mother was an unwed muleteer with less than perfect dentition whose favorite color was purple! CAN YOU IMAGINE? And the forkee’s daughter was there, so the mother forker was sure there would be fisticuffs aplenty!
But then I saved the day by pretending to stumble and disrupting the forkee’s entire placement by knocking the fork off! And then the servers put it all back where it was supposed to be and two hundred three people came up to me later and said that I had saved the day through etiquette, but the forkee told me she hadn’t noticed the shrimp fork and wouldn’t have cared.
Which is how I know that her mother really was a muleteer. The NERVE of people who can’t be insulted through petty backbiting nonsense!
Did you observe any of the later interactions between the bride and the groom’s family? Did you observe any of the social shunning, or are you making inferences? Did you observe any of the trashing in private settings? Were you present for any of that? How are you getting your information?
Because the right of a woman to have a job, have a career, and just interact with the world, should not require she sacrifice her sexual morality. Because no one, absolutely no one, has the right to touch a woman without her express, explicit permission. Congratulating the bride irritates me because of the marriage is legal prostitution implications.
If all that’s true, you hang out with a pretty shameful group of people.
Gotta create those implications and spread them around lest some women go through life unaware they are thought of as whores.
Are you saying that a woman is forced to take a man’s hand if he offers it, or are you saying that there are men going around in society grabbing women’s hands and forcing them to shake?
Oh hell, yes. I shared my (TA) office with a Kappa Delta. More than once I overheard how they plan to humiliate someone. Also, my work as an advisor (non-academic) frequently gave me a window into what was happening in people’s lives. I’ve listened to mother-in-laws plot ways to get rid of daughter-in-laws they don’t want. I’ve listened to the outcast women cry about their social isolation, their in-laws hatred, and sometimes worse, about the husbands who divorced them because they decided they were eventually too great of liabilities to their careers or social status.
What WASP? It’s really some made up minor rule that nobody really gives a shit about.
I have been fired from jobs because I refused to shake a man’s hand. That should be illegal.
I see why you have decided these WASPs should be the arbiters of all things etiquette-related. They sound lovely!
What do you mean by “advisor (non-academic)”? Could you give us more details about this position?
Maybe you could tone down the bigotry a bit? Please?
Also, ZPG Zealot, I’m puzzled by the idea that the only possible roles for a women in a relationship is prostitute or rape victim.
If you say “congratulations” to a man, you are presumably not calling him a male prostitute. So why the double standard? Are you saying that it’s impossible for women to want to actively seek out a partner, for non-prostitution related purposes?
(Yeah, I know that such an idea might seem crazy, but…)
By advisor, you mean card reader or fortune teller, right?
Search the Dope for my “Ask the fortune teller thread.” I have had clients that ranged from millionaires to the people who cleaned the millionaire’s houses (and sometimes the people the wealthy wouldn’t even hire to work for them). It has provided an interesting window in to humanity because people tell me what they really feel and believe, not what they admit to others.
One should not imply that the bride was so crass as to choose her partner for such reasons as salary expectations, social standing, etc.